I fiddled around with Ebay stuff, packed things, and eventually got around to some practice. I played a lot of Ro notes, and in general messed around. I think this is an area where I have been, in the past, just settling in and grinding away through exercises, and while this is good, it makes it more boring than it has to be.
This is also where I feel much more free to do this on the shakuhachi, because essentially there are no "wrong" fingerings. There are so few holes, that every combination gets used. It's fun to mess around, on this note you can waver it but the same note/fingering an octave up you can't so easily, etc.
I also made a cleaning pull-through by taking a silk one that's for a flute that I got along with one of my used flutes, and attached a string and a weight to it. The nice thing about a Shakuhachi Yuu is, being made of plastic, it can just be washed in the sink as far as that goes.
I need to get out busking, but I'm actually closer to being able to do so using the humble Shakuhachi Yuu, and this includes doing some external work on the Yuu to make it look a bit more like bamboo.
One of the players I used to follow on YouTube was, a couple-few years ago, "kind of" good. He was ... adequate. He gave his "origin story" in a more recent video, how he started out on shinobue because his taiko group lose their shinobue player. How he was in Japan and went out looking for a shinobue maker and ended up meeting a shakuhachi player and "the rest is history" lol. But over the last couple-few years while I've been fucking around, he's apparently been putting in a lot of work because now he's not just adequate, he's really good.
Rinban Sakamoto emailed me and I still can't print out the Google Drive music sheets he sends me, but will have printouts for those few of us who can't print them out. I replied that I at least have tons of those clear plastic page protectors, enough to share. So I'm going to bring a fat wad of those.
It's raining heavily so no trip to the post office today. But since I'm caught up on mailing, this doesn't bother me a bit.
I'm corresponding every day now with my Oahu friend. I offered yesterday to get him a laptop if he's having too much trouble using his smart phone to do email (which sounds hellish to me). But he says he has trouble typing on a keyboard so ... Like old guys do I guess, we're sharing our situations and plans regarding Social Security. In short I mentioned that I don't plan to move until I have Social Security to have a reliable trickle of money, as I put it, "A homeless person without money is a homeless person, while a homeless person with a thousand or so a month coming in, month in and month out, who doesn't smoke, drink, or do drugs, is a housed person".
I still don't know the full situation with this guy. He's not sure he'll be alive in two years when I come back there. I'm not sure he'll want to or be able to give me a place to "land" when I get back there. But I'm also thinking that through the temple and the shakuhachi club, I'll be able to find someone to "land" with also.
When the time for Ken to come over had come and gone, I called him up. He's having to work long hours doing some kind of EMI testing over in Menlo Park and no only could not come over tonight but is not sure if he can come over tomorrow night either. I said, just whenever time is OK, even the weekend or ... whenever.
I'd already listed 15 things for today, got 'em done early. And packed everything that's outstanding. So, I got out my collection of "to sell" books and threw in my flute books because it's looking like I'll never get through the Wye beginner book 1 much less the rest of 'em, and will sell them to the book store tomorrow. That will give me an excuse to go downtown.
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